10 awards and superlatives from Week 7: Hurts is Mr. Perfect, Taylor channels Faulk

Week 7 of the NFL season is almost in the books. We have two Monday Night Football games to go, but Sunday gave us 12 games that started with a stinker in London and ended with a stinker in San Francisco.

From a competitive point of view, it wasn’t the best weekend. Fortunately, that means there were a lot of guys who did some pretty awesome things, and a handful of guys (and teams) who did some downright laughable things. That’s what you have to get excited about.

Jonathan Taylor rocks, Jalen Hurts is perfect

The best place to start with a sleepy Week 7 is with the best game of the day. If the Bengals/Steelers game from Thursday was played on Sunday, it’d take the cake… but what happened in Denver was something special.

Game of the Year of the Week: Broncos/Giants

There was really only one contender for the Game of the Year of the Week on Sunday. Luckily, that game was awesome, and it was when the Broncos overcame a 26-8 deficit and came back to win in the last six minutes of the game.

That’s unbelievable. 1,602 straight wins for teams who were leading by 16 or more points with six minutes left, only for the Giants to break that streak? Whooo buddy. That’s perfect.

It makes it so much sweeter because the Giants were coming off a Thursday night win over the Eagles, so they were definitely feeling themselves. Then they shut the Broncos down for 45 minutes, only to realize the smell they were whiffing was a mix of ammonia and bleach.

Mr. Perfect: Jalen Hurts

Well, well, well… look at what we have here. The Eagles decided to let their Super Bowl MVP throw the football, and he did it at a predictably high level. Some might say that he was perfect… and that’s because he was.

He finished the game with a perfect 158.3 passer rating. He was the first quarterback to get that rating this season (there are normally three or four guys who have perfect games every year), and he was the first Eagles quarterback to have a perfect passer rating since Nick Foles in Week 9 of the 2013 season. 

This is a team that’s been looking to establish its identity. In the past six games, they tried running the ball, then they tried to run the ball the same way, they also tried running the ball, and they also tried to establish the run. It turns out that’s really hard to do behind an offensive line that’s hurt/injured/worn down, and it makes everyone (the team and the fans) mad and sad.

So in Week 7, they decided to put the game in Hurts’ hands and pass out of run looks. It was sick. A.J. Brown ended up having a season-high 121 receiving yards and two touchdowns, while DeVonta Smith had a career-high 183 receiving yards and a touchdown.

You might be asking yourself, ‘Why wouldn’t they do that earlier in the season?’ The answer: ‘Yep.’

Marshall Faulk: Jonathan Taylor

It seems like now is as good a time as any to give Jonathan Taylor his flowers. The dude is not just the best running back in the league; he’s the best running back in the league by a whole lot. 

He’s got the most rushing yards (697), which is over 100 more than the next closest guy (Javonte Williams, 592). He’s got the most rushing touchdowns (10), which is two more than the next closest guy (Josh Jacobs, 8). He’s got the most rushes of more than 10 yards (18), which is three more than the next guy (D’Andre Swift, 15). 

On Sunday, he had his third three-touchdown game of the season. That’s his fifth game with at least three touchdowns… which is the same amount as Marshall Faulk, the Hall of Fame running back who spent the first five years of his career in Indy, also wearing No. 28. Except Faulk did that in 12 years. Taylor is just seven games into his seventh season.

For what it’s worth: in 2006, LaDainian Tomlinson set the NFL record with 28 rushing touchdowns in a season. J.T. 's at 10 right now, so he’s going to have to pick up the pace if he’s going to have a chance to sniff what L.T. was doing.

Punt of the Year: Tress Way

Nobody likes a punt. EVERYBODY loves a perfect punt. At the beginning of the Commanders-Cowboys game, Washington’s All-Pro Punter, Tress Way, gave us exactly that. 

Are you kidding me? The entire premise of Top Gun 2 (spoiler alert) was that none of the people in the class Maverick is teaching can fly the path and drop a bomb correctly, and Maverick has to do it himself. They should’ve just called Tress Way.

This golden leg dropped the ball at the four-yard line, had it bounce to the one-yard line just so Percy Butler could grab it and walk a tightrope on the goalline. That’s unbelievable. 

And then they actually did something with it. No one ever does anything with that kind of field position. Every time there's an awesome punt like that, you always hope there's going to be a safety, but the offense normally ends up getting space and punting. No one ever gets a safety…

But sure enough, on the very next play, the Commanders capitalized and got the safety… You know… it didn’t matter even a little bit in the grand scheme of things because they ended up losing 44-22, but at least it was cool.

Mahomes hot mic, Vrabel's revenge game and more

Hot Mic: Patrick Mahomes

The entire idea of the Mic’d Up stuff is to give everyone a listen to the stuff we don’t normally hear during the game. The problem is that we know that there are clips that the production leaves on the cutting-room floor. Those are the juicy tidbits that we really want.

Yeah, we know that Josh Jacobs is going to be hyping up his offensive line after he gets two rushing touchdowns… but what we really want is to hear an uncensored Baker Mayfield dog-cussing a cornerback.

Enter: the Hot-Mic. It gives us a little bit of that.

Obligatory caution: this clip has some potty language

On Sunday, we got a Patrick Mahomes hot mic, and it ended up being a pretty good one.

If there hadn’t been a parabolic mic aimed directly at him, this would’ve been an all-time confusing play. Just watch it without volume, and you’ll see what I mean by that. It just looks like a weird formation and a couple of guys in the backfield doing weird motions, followed by Mahomes being mad at something. 

With volume, you see why it works. He’s gotta drop some F-Bombs in order to really sell it. If he just said, ‘Aw shucks. This kind of stuff never works,’ it just wouldn’t have the same juice as a profanity-laden tirade.

It’s also a play that wouldn’t work at an away game where a crowd is at full throat. It was kind of perfect, and it had to be because Mahomes doesn’t do QB sneaks anymore since he dislocated his knee cap on one in 2019. 

It is a little unsettling that Matt Nagy’s play design now needs voice acting to work. Remember when he just had everyone do ring-around-the-rosie?

Unbridled Hatred: Mike Vrabel

Revenge games are what make the world go ‘round, and very rarely is everyone all on the side of the guy getting revenge; the whole world was on Mike Vrabel’s side on Sunday. 

Vrabel was the Titans’ head coach from 2018 to 2023, and in that time, he had a record of 54-45, brought the team to the playoffs twice (with Ryan Tannehill as his quarterback), and had the top-seed in the AFC once. Nothing obviously came from any of that, but it was still impressive. 

In 2023, he had to deal with a quarterback room of Tannehill, Malik Willis, and Will Levis; that team ended up going 6-11. 

There was a little bit of hairiness that went around his firing. The general thought is that the front office stopped liking him, even though everyone else did like him. There was even a whole thing where some general managers (possibly the Titans’) thought he was too big and physically imposing to be a head coach.

The Titans fired Vrabel’s replacement, Brian Callahan, the week before Vrabel’s Patriots headed to Tennessee… which must have felt like a brutal slap in the face.

Yada, yada, yada. The Pats came in and beat the life out of the Titans. Drake Maye was 21-of-23 for 222 yards and a touchdown, and they rushed for 175 yards on the way to their 31-13 win. 

For some reason, sports books only had the Patriots as seven-ish point favorites in this game. Maybe, football-wise, that number was right. But it clearly didn’t take into account Vrabes’ spite and how much his team likes him. 

It was swift justice, and you love to see that in the football world. 

Football Rocks: Theo Johnson touchdown

There are a handful of plays so stupid, nonsensical, and awesome every season that you can do nothing but sit there with your mouth open and catatonically drool on yourself. The Giants, of all teams, put one of those out there when Jaxson Dart connected with Theo Johnson for a 41-yard touchdown.

Just how they drew it up. It was almost like a perfectly-timed forward-hook-and-ladder. The ball smacked the wide receiver in the hands, just for it to float into Theo Johnson’s orbit so he could catch it in stride and take it for six points. 

Unbelievable. That’s something that happens in NFL Blitz. The dude was going full speed, and then hitting the catch point gave him enough separation from the defender that he was able to just waltz right on into the endzone.

That was bonkers, and it was totally awesome. Football rocks.

That makes sense: Jets

So, the Jets lost again, and they have a very real chance to be the first team to go 0-17 in a season and the first team to go winless since the 2017 Browns.

If there was any thought about whether or not Justin Fields is the guy for them, he is, but he isn’t. He clearly stinks and won’t be the Jets’ quarterback after this season, but when he got hurt/benched and Tyrod Taylor went in… woof.

Taylor came in and was able to move the ball better than Fields, but he also threw two gutting interceptions, one of which was an awesome play by the Panthers’ cornerback Jaycee Horn. 

It’s so perfectly Jets: they prioritized signing Justin Fields in free agency while completely ignoring his inability to effectively and consistently throw the football. Then they benched him mid-game, and his backup came in and threw the ball to the other team. It just makes sense.

The Jets did have 139 net passing yards in Week 7, which is a whole lot better than their -10 net yards in Week 6. It’s easy to say, ‘they did 149 yards better,’ but it’s funnier to say, ‘their passing improved by 1,490%.’

Most confusing team: Falcons

What are the Titans? In Week 3, they got blown out by the Panthers. Three weeks after that, it looked like they could be world beaters when they decimated an injured Bills defense on Monday night. 

So on Sunday night, it seemed like they were going to just rinse and repeat that Bills strategy when they went up against an equally, if not more, injured 49ers defense. 

They didn’t. Aside from a couple of decent drives and god-like Bijan Robinson plays, the Falcons’ offense looked pathetic. They ended up losing 20-10, and it didn’t even feel that close. 

What is that team? Why are they confusing? We (read: I) need to know how to feel about them. Almost every other team in the NFL has come into its own, and the Falcons are over there farting around and playing wildly inconsistently. Get it together.

Rookie of the Week: Quinshon Judkins

This game was set up for the Brown’s rookie running back, Quinshon Judkins, to have an awesome game. Going into the week, the over/under for the game opened at 40.5 points. Then the news of rainy and windy weather came in, and that number dropped to 35.5 points, which is massive.

The Browns’ game plan was to not have Dillon Gabriel throw the ball and just have Judkins run the ball. When you’re playing against the Dolphins, who have one of, if not the worst, running defenses in the league, that’s a good game plan. 

Judkins ended up with 25 carries for 84 yards and three touchdowns. It was awesome. Two of his touchdowns were from a Wildcat formation. Scoring from the Wildcat in 2025 is bullying... Scoring from Wildcat twice is assault.